After Alice (31 page)

“
Schmatte
trade,” Father had said, dismissively.

When did Alice give up? Sidonie thinks now: even by being married to Buck, Alice was punishing Mother and Father, all of those years.

Sidonie says, finally, to Adam: “We can't win this. Let's give her some money; let her go.”

Even then, she hopes that giving in will cause Cynthia to change her mind; that the rebellion will have burnt itself out, or prove to have been rebellion for its own sake. But no; Cynthia coldly accepts Sidonie's offer to subsidize her for three months and pay her return airfare, and continues to make her plans. Her grades do pick up; that's one good result. And the good scholarship she receives can be postponed a year. But Sidonie is stiff with worry. How will Cynthia make a life for herself?

Right up to the night before she leaves, Cynthia is sulky; she has wanted to go to a party with friends, has wanted to convert the airfare into cash and hitchhike, but Sidonie has insisted that she spend the evening with family. Adam is there; also Clara and her daughters, who are near Cynthia's age, and Anita.

We are not her family, though, Sidonie thinks. They are different, she sees that now. Portia and Ismene, Clara's daughters, though they share some of that teen hubris, that self-absorption, are not like Cynthia. They have — what? — a sense of possession about them already. A sense of entitlement. It's as if they have already been granted or taken a lien on their adult lives. They simply need to wait, to continue what they're doing — immersing themselves in activities, social life, music, paying not quite enough attention to their school work — and everything will unfold naturally before them, their birthright. They will go to university (Portia is already in her first year) and then into jobs and marriage and continue to do pretty well the same things. They have no anxiety, because their lives are pleasant and will not change. They will not change.

But for Cynthia, as for her older brothers, and for Sidonie and Alice as well, there has been too much gulf between their lives as children and what they want their lives to be as adults. Too much wanting, too much fear — of getting there, of not getting there. Of not choosing the right thing. Of whatever they choose costing too much.

At their dinner two nights before Stephen's wedding, Kevin had said, “I'd like to have my own restaurant. But I'd never have the start-up money. They say you need two years in the bank.” Paul had said, “I'd like to go back to school, maybe do engineering. I was good at math. But what's the use of coming out with thirty thousand in student loans and no job?” And Stephen, after a few beers, had confessed, “I really wanted to travel. But I need to get married. If I don't marry Debbie, she'll find someone else.”

I could bankroll one of them, Sidonie had thought. But which one would be the best bet? And it was not just the money, she knew. She probably could afford to invest — well, maybe — in a restaurant for Kevin, or to put Paul through at least four years of university. She could sacrifice some of her retirement savings. But she was quite certain it wouldn't do any good. They would waste it, or turn it down, afraid of wasting it. There would be some excuse. She could hear it, in the vagueness of their plans, in their focus on the outcome, rather than the process, in their assumed, second-hand cynicism. (It's who you know, anyway; they just beat the original ideas out of you; the government will just tax you till your business goes under.) It is wearying, how well she knows the barriers they will erect for themselves. And how well she knows the men they'll be middle-aged: worn out, ungenerous, heavy-drinking or religious or both. Angry.

What she wonders, the night before Cynthia is to turn her back on an assured and stable future, is whether it's an issue of class or wealth or geography that separates her niece, Alice's daughter, from Adam's nieces.

It's not brains, or natural ability. She and Alice could both run rings around not only the other children they grew up with, but also just about anyone she's met. And Alice's children are clearly all bright, too.

What is it?

She and Adam have a disjointed, at-cross-purposes argument. Adam chides her: they're all
our
nieces.

“I think it must be ethno-geographic,” she says. “People from the West, especially the rural West; they don't have the same certainty. They don't have as much invested in certain social mores.”

“She's just finding herself,” Adam says. She is confused by his having changed sides; now he seems to be in favour of Cynthia taking time off. But she is always confused by this trait, this ability, in Adam, and others. She herself does not let go, once she has decided something. Does not forget. She is implacable once she turns her back.

She does not sell Beauvoir in 1985: the prices have fallen, and she can't get enough for it to make it worthwhile. After a year she takes it off the market. Walter Rilke manages the orchards for a while, then finds her other tenants.

More than two decades ago. And Cynthia has turned out just fine, as Adam and Clara had known she would: she has meaningful, interesting, well-compensated work; she has friends (though she doesn't appear to have a romantic life); she has Justin, who is also turning out to be an admirable human being. Sidonie thinks: she has succeeded without me. She has succeeded precisely because I've given her space, have not interfered.

It is a small, lonely pride, that: to congratulate oneself on having had the sense to leave another person alone, to free another person from one's own possibly damaging contact. But there it is. She had provided Cynthia with a family life of sorts; with an excellent education, a way of living in the world with a handicap; and with room to find her own way.

Surely that has been enough compensation for anything she might have taken. Or lost.

Cynthia has set her to
sorting some boxes of papers: “I wouldn't know what was useful to keep,” she says, as if this were Sidonie's fault.

A box of orchard records. Her father's ledger books tell their own story: a tale of diminishing returns. Profits in the 1940s, mostly rising until the late 1950s. Such small amounts of cash: a dollar a day, plus the picker's cabin to Mr. Tanaka in the mid-1950s. How had he and Masao stayed alive? Bad crops for a few years after the devastating winter of 1949. The prices of gas, pesticides, equipment, and especially labour, rise; the prices of apples, cherries, peaches, rise and fall. Sidonie looks for mistakes, extravagances, waste, but can't find any. The balance simply changes.

At Christmas she has half-finished sorting the ledgers. She reports her progress to Cynthia, feeling like a tardy grad student. Cynthia seems somewhat mollified.

“I guess it's all a long time ago,” she says. “I guess it doesn't seem worth it, going through all of that old stuff.”

Yes and no. Part of the past — before her leaving the valley in 1959 — deepens in her every year, part of her cellular makeup, it seems. The intervening years, except for some sharp, clear shards of memory, are grainy.

Between her honeymoon visit in 1963 and Stephen's wedding in 1985, Sidonie had returned to the valley three times: for her father's funeral, her mother's, and Alice's.

Father dies in late fall of 1970, suddenly and not suddenly. Suddenly, because there is no final illness: he sits up in bed, Mother says, clutches his chest, and keels over. A massive heart attack, Mother says. All the arteries blocked. She says this with some amazement, but also pride, with apparently no sense that her limited medical insight might be painful to others. It occurs to Sidonie that her mother has a habit of making bald, possibly inappropriate statements that is not unlike her own.

Not suddenly, because Father is seventy-four, fond of his cigar and whiskey, not to mention Mother's pies and her dairy-based cooking, and of working too hard and then not working, by turns, the way orchardmen do. Of working very hard physically in the extreme heat and cold for a few days at a time. It's not a surprise for those reasons, Sidonie tells Adam. And it's the death he would have chosen: quick, clean. No suffering.

Adam regards Sidonie sorrowfully, buys the plane tickets, treats her as if she were fragile. He offers to call her secretary and ask her to cancel all of Sidonie's appointments.

“What for?” Sidonie asks. “I don't want to fall behind with my research. I can go in tomorrow and Wednesday; I'll just rebook for the days I'll actually be away.”

She believes that Adam is projecting his grief from his own father's death onto her. That she has a free pass card, exempting her from feeling the loss of her father too deeply.

But later, seeing Father's polished shoes lined up in the back entrance, grief ambushes her like a mountain lion; something ravenous, howling, implacable rips open her chest and crushes her heart and lungs. Father will never again look kindly at her over his spectacles, sing snatches of
Lieder
as she helps him lift pipes, put his hands on her shoulders in that way that situates her safely in her skin, when she feels about to come undone, when her self threatens to fly apart.

And all earlier grief rises in her memory to augment this one, and she can only crouch on her bed and rock and moan, until Mother stands over her with a dour look and instructs her to pull herself together, to not be a baby. “Some good all of your schooling has done,” Mother says. “And you a psychologist! You of all people should know how to control yourself.”

Psychology is not about controlling yourself, of course. But what has leapt upon her is something physical, something lurking in the world of her mind. It is wordless, without language or logic. It is not to be managed.

But Mother has no time for carrying on; she has a funeral to plan. Sidonie must drive her around, so that she can take care of all the many things that need to be done. Mother has never learned to drive: unusual for a country woman. Mother needs to be driven into town, to the florists, the funeral home, the delicatessen, the lawyer's office, the bank. All of this, Sidonie remonstrates, could be done over the telephone, but Mother says no, no, I get confused and forget things on the phone. People speak too quickly. And trailing her on her tour of stops, Sidonie realizes that Mother is making a sort of progress, a formal circle of visits, whose purpose is threefold: one, it buttresses Mother up, receiving the many courtesies and condolences. Two, it allows her to re-establish these social and professional relationships on a new footing: Mother as independent agent, not as part of a couple. Three, it gives Mother something to do, so she need not think too much.

No darkened rooms, chamomile tea, hushed voices for Mother, as there had been for her mother-in-law, Estelle, when Adam's father had died.

Mother's dry-eyed energy is exhausting, though, and it is a relief when Alice and Buck arrive with the children.

Alice has changed again: she has thickened around the middle; her hair is darker, long and untidy. Her clothes — jeans and a plaid flannel shirt — are not very clean. Her face is tan; she wears no makeup. You would not look at her twice, Sidonie thinks. It is a shock.

But then, almost instantly, she can see that this new look suits Alice. It is more appropriate to the zeitgeist; Alice looks like what she is, a working-class mother of four. It is a natural look. And she is still beautiful; Sidonie sees that, at dinner. The curve of Alice's chin and jaw, the straight small blade of her nose, her large grey-blue eyes: they are perfect, immutable. And though she is not as slender as she was as a girl, Alice still holds herself with that unusual grace. The angle of her neck, her arm, the turn of her waist, at any time, is always perfect, lovely. It's impossible to be in the same room and not be struck by her loveliness.

Mother seems intent on praising, singling out Sidonie at Alice's expense. Isn't her outfit lovely? What a chic haircut. And Alice ought to wear darker lipstick to give her lips some punch. And look how slim Sidonie is. It's so important for a married woman not to let herself go. When there are all these terrible girls now with no morals just waiting to grab someone's man.

Has Mother always done this? It seems understandable that Alice would be jealous, angry. “I'm so dowdy,” Sidonie says. “This suit is more than four years old. It's totally out of style. And I've put on at least fifteen pounds since my wedding.” She can't remember being praised to Alice, like this. Only when she and Adam came out on the train, perhaps. And remember what happened then. It is uncomfortable that Alice should be slighted like this.

But Alice doesn't rise to the bait, only smiles to herself. And then, surprisingly, she catches Sidonie's eye and grins broadly at one of Mother's pointed remarks. The gaps between her teeth are still there, Sidonie sees, but somehow they add to Alice's charm. Her hippie charm. Alice grins and raises an eyebrow, and this is so unexpected, so unprecedented, that Sidonie is unable to respond. She realizes only slowly; she is being invited to take Alice's side against Mother. Has that ever happened before?

The boundaries have shifted. Sidonie is not the outsider, but the one courted. She doesn't trust that. She knows where that leads. She must be cautious.

Buck has lost all of his earlier wildness, his sullenness and disaffection. He seems ultra-concerned with rules, propriety. He's obsessed with being punctual to church, with the boys being obedient, not just to himself but to all adults (“You listen to grandmaw, now, y'hear?”) and rants about litter left on the roadside. It's as if there are only two possibilities: rebel or authority figure. Nothing in-between. Of the two, Sidonie would have chosen the position of rebel; he was less dangerous then than he is now: a small, angry man who wants to control and punish everyone.

This is before his accident with the acetylene torch; at this point, Buck is still working intermittently at things. He works at the packing house, at the sawmill, on highway construction. Is still strong and fit enough to consider himself, to be considered, a young man. He is still looking for his break. And it does seem more hopeful, at this point, because he has become more conventional, more invested in society.